API Technology - OData

29 May 2011

There is an ever growing amount of data available today and much of this data is now being collected and stored across a wide variety of system, locked into specific applications or formats, making it difficult to access, integrate and share.

The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock data and free it from silos that exist in many applications.

OData frees data by applying and building upon existing web technologies like HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores.

OData emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is currently used to expose and access data from relational databases, file systems, content management systems and custom websites.

OData works to be consistent with the way the World Wide Web works, adhering to HTTP standards just like RESTful APIs. This reuse of core Web principles allows OData to provide data integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, services, and tools.